Antje - We Danced

Santiago’s fingers rippled on the keyboard, words appearing on the screen at a speed that gave the illusion they developed as entities and not as a constructions of individual letters. He thought better this way, more organized, more logical, more clear.  The act of committing ideas to digital form, whether he saved his musing or not, always produced resolution to whatever dilemma he faced.
“She is a witch” he typed while the feel of that soft brown hair brushing his cheek took hold of his memory abetting his argument. “I can’t think of anything but her, my mind refuses to focus on anything but her, all I can see, eyes open or closed are blue, blue eyes looking into mine.”
“She is a witch!”
“If we were in Salem I could just dash off a note to the Magistrate and the whole matter would be removed from my attention.”  With total contempt for his words, the recall of the touch of her hand resting on his shoulder, electric through the polo shirt he had been wearing, stirred his body as it had the night before.
“A man truly has no defense against witches,” he wrote but now he was smiling.
“Gonna get someone else to clean the place; spend a little profit and get myself out of there at a decent hour.” Not as illogical as it might first seem, that’s what he’d been doing when she entered his life. Santiago was owner, bartender and clean-up crew for “The Inside Straight,” a country-western place on the outskirts of town. The place had been closed an hour, he had all the chairs upended and resting on the tables, the bucket and mop just retrieved from the storage room. He had another hour in front of him before he could get out back to his trailer and get some sleep.
Then, through the door, she came into his life, not so much a lightning bolt as the first sip of an ice cold beer. Even in memory, he couldn’t decided whether the page boy had been dirty blonde or an off red, sort of a tarnished halo. The jeans over sandals and white blouse arranged themselves in the proper order. His body paid attention, a warm glow suffusing it, while his mind wondered what she wanted. “We’re closed,” he’d announced, abrupt but not unfriendly.
“I know,” she answered, “but I think I may have left my purse here. Came back to see if it managed to last the night or someone gave it a new home.” She smiled as people do who are seeking a favor. He smiled back as men do who are simply foolishly reacting to a beautiful woman.
“I put one back behind the bar,” he’d said. “I bet it’s probably yours.” For such a poor opening line, the amazing thing that happened was a flood of conversation, the two of them still standing, Antje just inside the door she let close behind her, Santiago at the edge of the tables holding the mop in both hands as if he needed the support. Ordinarily, Santiago thought these conversations tended to follow the pattern of a POW interrogation with the only appropriate answers being name, rank, and serial number. This time, the introductions lasted long enough to get to the where they lived, where she worked, how she liked her time that evening in The Inside Straight.
They talked right past those ice breakers to the kind of music the band played and how neither had been real thrilled with them and Santiago didn’t think he’d book them again to it was getting late and she had to work tomorrow to she lived alone, her family back east, and him, too, living alone.
“She’s a witch!” Santiago typed, remembering how his hands had released the mop handle allowing it to fall noisily to the floor, the mop head lifting from the bucket to spray his leg with soapy water, then sinking back into the hail raising the handle to bang on the end of the bar.
“I should have given her her purse and got back to what I was doing.”  But, he hadn’t. He’d cleared a table of its chairs, offered her a seat and a glass of something cold to drink. She’d asked for water and he’d poured one for himself as well. They sat at the table, across from each other as if the solid presence of the table between them would keep things on a safe, formal basis.
“Except her smile kept filling my chest with amazement or appreciation or astonishment or all that rolled into one….one something I never felt before.  It was magic and she’s a witch.”
Typing these words brought a rush of disgust to Santiago. He was a grown man, after all, and blaming Antje for his reaction was pretty childish.  He’d always been impatient with Ali ibn Abu Taleb’s observation believing men need to be responsible for their own actions. Yeah, he read too much but what else you gonna do to fill the time between noon when all the deliveries are complete and five when you opened the place?
“Okay, it wasn’t her magic. She was just a good looking woman and I was in the mood to be smitten with a good looking woman. But, okay genius, explain what happened if it wasn’t magic.”
Talking about music had led to likes and dislikes and that led to the juke box where examples could be found. Santiago had cued three or four songs, they sat at the table listening, and when the songs completed, discussed the merits of each. A half hour after the last song, their glasses were empty and it seemed a good time to call it quits. Walking to the bar to get her purse, Santiago had another thought.
He put another coin in the juke box, put her purse down on the table without releasing it to her and extended his hand to Antje in invitation. “You’ll only get this back on one condition,” he’d said and she knew he was asking her to dance. She accepted.
The pitying strains of Whiskey Lullaby filled the room as she stepped into his arms, his arm sliding around her waist, her hand resting on his shoulder, their hands mated and held close. He was just taller than she so her chin rested nicely on his shoulder pushing her hair against his cheek. He hadn’t raised the house lights yet as he was just starting to mop the place out when she’d come through the door so that the mood for what happened next was almost redundant.
“We danced. “
They had not talked at all, just danced. Santiago supposed Antje might have been listening to the lyrics but he knew he had not. He had concentrated on the feast before his senses, the smell of Antje, the sound of her breathing, the mesh of her chest and his, and he lost himself in the sensation of gliding across the floor. It was a waltz they danced and Santiago had not waltzed since elementary school and then only to show off the box step his mother had insisted he learn.
“No one waltzes anymore,” he wrote but as soon as this disclaimer appeared on the screen he knew that he and Antje would only ever waltz. At this moment, he could imagine devoting the rest of his life dancing with Antje, day in, day out, everyday.
It was magic! The dance was pure magic. Two people as two people were meant to be, in tune with each other and the music and the night.
“How long did that record last?” he typed thinking that it had seemed forever but knowing that the record in the jukebox could not have been much more than 3 minutes long. He looked it up to satisfy his curiosity: 3 minutes 10 seconds.
However long the dance lasted, when it was over they smiled awkwardly, broke contact with embarrassed laughs and walked back to the table no longer physically connected but somehow all the more connected for the lack of touch. She took her purse, thanked him for keeping it safe, and walked to the door.
“Will you be back?” he called after her.
“Not this morning,” she laughed and then she was out the door.
It had been after five when he finally got to bed. The first delivery arrived at 9:03 AM. He knew because he checked the clock when the door bell began to demand his attention.
* * *
Three days later, Santiago typed his thoughts at his computer again.
“She’s a witch!” This time he had the satisfaction of a conversation to fall back on. “The Black Forest.” she said which Santiago knew was in Germany. “Alamanni,” she said, “her people,” though the name meant nothing to Santiago. She tried to explain. “Back in the olden times, fighting Romans, sacking churches, all the fun stuff for which we earned a bad name, Asinius Qaudratus wrote us up and we never recovered. Of course, we didn’t know we were being written up; We’d have invented writing for ourselves so we could reply in kind  but we didn’t discover the horror perpetrated until centuries later.”
Santiago still had no clue to what she was talking about. With frustrated energy she started over. “Pisgies,” she said, “do you know Pisgies?”
Santiago couldn’t hear the capitalization and heard something else altogether. “No, I do not need to use the toilet,” she harrumphed. Santiago hadn’t known people could really harrumph but Antje did.
“She’s a witch!” he typed again. “Okay,” he amended, “she’s a Pisgie. That’s an English word for witch is what that is.” But, he knew it wasn’t. She’d told him it was as close a name for her people as anything else in the English language. As for as her people were concerned, Juthungi worked fine as did Alammani. They always tried to blend in.
Santiago tried to make sense of it. “Black Forest?” he asked embarrassed at the inanity of the question.
“North of the Rhine, west of the Danube,” she answered.  “What’s important is that the Black Forest is famous for cuckoo-clocks and Black Forest Cake and music boxes. It’s also famous for its werewolves, sorcerers, witches and the devil in varying disguises. Of course, the dwarves try to balance all those others out, the dwarves and my people.”
“Your people?” In retrospect, he could not have appeared more dense if he had put everything he had into it.
“We/re back to Pisgies, Santiago. That’ll just have to do.”
“Okay,” he said, “what about these Pisgies?”
“We dance.”
“They dance,” he typed, the chill racing from his spine to his fingers tapping the keys. “They dance; we danced.” The connection seemed painfully obvious.
“You’re Pixies,” he said, trying to start over.
“And you’re a broken record,” she smiled. “Pisgies and pixies are pretty much the same thing in Jolly Olde but my people resist the Pixie tag. It’s just too cute.”
“But….but…” he finally organized his confusion into a semi-literate question, or a statement that he made into a question at the last minute, “Pixies are tiny…?”
“Like I said, Santiago, we don’t use the term on ourselves.”
“So, you’re a witch?” Santiago asked.
“If you are not going to listen there is not much point to this conversation, is there?”
“She’s a witch,” he typed. Then, he added “but she says she’s a Pisgie. Not a Pixie!!! No, never a Pixie; just a Pisgie and that isn’t even what she is. She’s something else for which there is no name. I’m Irish or Hispanic depending on which side of the tree you follow but she is something for which there is no name.”
Typing these thoughts removed most of the emotional content of the words. Santiago sat looking at the screen, working on accepting the facts he had placed there. When he thought he had grasped the essential informational content, he started typing again:  “She is a Pisgie and they dance.”
With that, the memory of that first night and that first dance came crashing back but this time there were borders of insanity flirting on the edges. “She magicked me?” his mind asked and his gut answered “You’re god damned right she did!”  Santiago stopped typing.
* * *
Three days passed, three nights they spent alone talking long after Santiago closed the bar.  He spent the time trying to make sense of who she was; she spent the time trying to get him on the dance floor. “Not till I have this straightened out in my head,” he told her and so they’d go through the whole thing once again.
“We dance,” she repeated for the thirtieth of the fiftieth or the thousandth time. “We took our dancing up to the Bohemian Forest…”
“I thought you said Black Forest,” Santiago interrupted.
“In the course of a millennia or so, we did some traveling. Most folk do, you know. They get out and see the world.” Santiago had been no place but El Paso; Juarez didn’t count as being someplace else; it was as much El Paso as El Paso was.
“We took our dancing north and the folk there took a liking to it. When they were dancing as much as we were, we went home to the Black Forest. In fact, they helped us refine our dance. We had flutes and voices but they had yodeling and that talent gave us haunting additions to our repertoire.”
This habit of stunned reaction was getting to be more than Santiago could tolerate but, once again, he found himself asking a one-word question: “Yodeling?”
“It’s quite remarkable,” she said. “Anyway, they called it a turning dance, a weller. When we got back home, our neighbors took it up. The Hapsburgs took it up, made it the waltz. The French followed suit improving their contredanse and quadrille to an allemande and then to a waltz. Then, the English imported it so, of course, you Americans had to have it as well.”
Santiago still had not broken the habit: “Your people invented the waltz?”
“My people invented the dance. Others made it the waltz. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you..Don’t you ever listen?”
* * *
Another four days filled with another four days of conversation. Santiago gradually came to accept Antje’s explanation of who her people where.  Her delight in his growing comprehension found expression in broad smiles, clapped hands, and great laughs. To hear her say “yes, yes, that’s it, precisely!” gave him continuous flushes of pleasure. He discovered her approval had become important to him, so much so that he spent his days prepping himself for the late night encounters. He began to spend time on the web searching for information about The Black Forest, the Pisgies even though he reminded himself that her people were not Pisgies,  and – most of all – the waltz.
Carrying cases of beer from the cellar to the coolers behind the bar, toting cases of whiskey to stock the bar, lugging blocks of ice to chip them into the coolers, all this activity passed unnoticed as he wrestled with the waltz. It was magic, he knew this for certain, but it had been common, too. The Austrian peasant dance had been the rage of all the courts of Europe.
The rage and the scourge. Santiago found The Times article from July, 1816 that complained: …it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous entertwining of the limbs and close compressure on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females.”  Fifty years later, the English magazine Belgravia could still complain: “..and see without the slightest discomposure our sister and our wife seized on by a strange man and subjected to violent embraces and canterings round a small-sized  apartment – the only apparent excuse for such treatment being that it is done to the sound of music -…” Santiago laughed at the image of what today’s dances would have produced in those reporters’ minds. He also thought of steps forward and steps backward, how we came from the contredanse to the line dance, from the quadrille to the square dance,
Mostly, he thought of that haloed girl who occupied his early mornings. She had traveled, as her people were wont to do. Her travels brought her to El Paso. She was looking for something but what that might be she claimed to have no idea and he found no reason to doubt her claim.  He found many reasons to just  think of her and how she had felt in his arms gliding around that hardwood floor. Mostly, he concluded that he did not want to lose that feeling, did not want to lose connection to this woman. On the afternoon of the eleventh day he made a trip to Juarez.
* * *
The bar closed leaving Antje and Santiago to themselves. She helped him perform the after closing rites so that they finally were able to sit at their table with no distractions.  Her presence, as always, grabbed Santiago’s gut and tossed it in little spasms. His fingers drummed on the table till her raised eyebrow was more question than he was prepared to answer. “Okay,” he thought, “she’s a witch; the dance is magic, and I’m being conned. Have I ever felt better? Has any woman ever moved me this much? Am I willing to let her walk out the door with the possibility of never seeing her again. No way in hell!”
“Okay, Santiago, what’s up? What’s going on?” The look on her face spoke of rude suspicions but also an undertone of amused tolerance. With a shyness new to him, Santiago fumbled in his shirt pocket to retrieve a diamond ring which he presented to her across the table, two fingers holding the ring so the stone could catch the dimmed light.
Across the table, Antje’s eyes filled with tears. “This is the last thing I expected,” she said as she took the ring. Her hands moved the ring around, up, down, her eyes admiring every detail of its construction. Neither said a word, silence more appropriate to her deliberation. Santiago’s heart did major calisthenics waiting her reply as he searched her face for a clue to her reaction. At last, she held the ring in her right hand, in front so both could see what see what talking about. Her left hand slid across the table to take his hand. “I’ll only marry you on one condition,” she said, rising from her chair as she made the statement. Santiago followed her lead. Later, when Antje had finally left for home, Santiago typed:
“And we danced.
Out there on that empty hardwood floor
The chairs up and the lights turned way down low
The music played, we held each other close
And we danced
Like no one else had ever danced before
I can't explain what happened on that floor
But the music played
We held each other close
And we danced.”(1)

(1)“We Danced” by Brad Paisely